Back in the 1970s I was vacationing on St Croix and took a day trip to St Thomas in a Grumman Goose flown by Antilles Airboats. It was a tiny little plane flying harbor to harbor, one pilot, nine passenger seats including the front right. (My wife sat there.)

This line was best known for being owned by movie star Maureen O'Hara, but it was run by her husband Charles Blair who had both a long Air Force and NASA flying career rising to Brig. Gen., and a lengthy career flying commercially, including for United in the 1930s and Pan Am in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a a lot of personal flying including a trip from NYC to London in 1951 in a modified P-51 that still holds the piston speed record for that route, followed a few months later by a solo trans-polar trip from Norway to Alaska. (The plane's at the Smithsonian.)

This guy knew about as much about flying as anyone could, he ran AAB, and it still had a horrible safety record, ending with a crash in 1978 with Blair himself at the controls that killed all four on board.

A little poking around on the web shows a long string of accidents of seaplanes in saltwater service. Are these things just dangerous? It's not just that they're antiques, the antique DC-3's in land service don't seem to have anywhere near the failure rate.

A good comparison might be the routes from Vancouver to Victoria and Nanaimo BC, harbour to harbour (it's in Canada), but more modern fleets. Their safety record seems OK.

Seems to me a reason that people think flying is dangerous is that in days of yore, it was. When a Pan Am Clipper took off from a dock on San Francisco bay to island-hop across the Pacific, there was a not-insignificant chance that it would never show up at the other end. The giant flying boats of the air had four or six engines so that they could be reasonably confident that three or four of them would work all the way to the next pit stop.

People don't appreciate how much more reliable jets are than prop planes, or how much more reliable modern jet engines are than the ones on a 707 or DC-8 or a Comet. Reporters (present company of course excepted) are only human, the folklore is passed along in the newsroom, so by golly if plane travel was dangerous and big news when we wrote about it in 1937, it still is now.

FYI, this noxious bill is S.2453, not S.2543 as in the text of the article.

I've bought a lot of cell phones over the years, and anyone who seriously thinks that demanding a name from cell phone buyers will deter bad guys, well, isn't serious.

It is easy and legal to ask a local 13 year old to buy you a phone, using her middle school ID. It is easy and legal to ask a friend in another state to buy some phones, stick them in a jiffy bag and mail them to you. For GSM phones (AT&T and T-Mobile), the phone number is on a removable SIM chip available in lots of 50 on eBay for about $2 each, again quite legally.

As another person has noted, it's already possible to tell pretty closely where a cell phone is being used, and even if you don't know who's using it, they can track all the calls made to or from a particular phone, which eventually will come up with enough details to identify the user. All this silly law would do would be to encourage crooks to switch phones more often, making them harder to track.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has often written on security theater, intrusive but ineffective or counterproductive actions whose goal is to give people the impression that the authorities are doing something. This is just another one.

The one word answer is "Castro".

Sugarcane ethanol makes sense in Brazil, since it grows well and they have an integrated industry that powers the ethanol plants with the bagasse from the cane used as feedstock. But here in the US our sugar industry is heavily protected, with tariffs on sugar and a 54 cent/gallon tariff on incoming Brazilian ethanol. Why? The US sugar cane industry is concentrated in Florida, where the politically well-connected Fanjul family is the largest producer (now that US Sugar shut down) and has skillfully lobbied for price supports for decades. They're closely tied to the anti-Castro Cuban community, making them politically difficult to oppose.

In an economically rational world, we'd be importing tanker loads of Brazilian ethanol, which they'd be delighted to sell us, and using it in dual fuel cars. But not in this one.

The paper says that traders made more money on days when their testosterone was higher. I wonder if the took a tip from A-rod,

By the way, the paper is here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/16/6167.full.pdf

I suspect the reason that US assigned the names of its dead predecessors to its commuters was to prevent anyone else from using the names. The old Piedmont had a much better reputation than its descendants, and if I were US, I sure wouldn't want a competitor named Piedmont.

(Hope it was OK to write something related to the actual column. If need be I could throw in a few gratuitous insults.)